I won a prize!

Just for posting some pictures on the 3 Creative Studios flickr group last month, I was selected to win a random prize. It was two patterns all the way from Australia from Brenda Gael Smith of Serendipity Patchwork & Quilting. Brenda hosted a shibori workshop and presented four great tutorials. Check them out here.

We had some rain last weekend, which has been a rare occurrence here in central North Carolina, and the flowers all looked great afterwards. Peonies are ready to bloom--

And the silver dollar plant will have lots of seeds this year--

Coral bells are looking better than they have since I planted them about 3 years ago--

I got this book at the library a couple of weeks ago, and have been attempting the cathedral windows pattern. I had tried the cathedral window pattern way back in the 1970s, but did it all by hand then, this book has directions for hand and machine work. Will post something as soon as I get far enough long so that it actually looks like something.

Nice weekend

Well, except for the tornadoes flying through central NC on Saturday, it was a good weekend. On Saturday I tried a new shibori technique that was presented in the Shibori Girl on-line workshop I'm taking. I used the rubbermaid sink protector I had previously used for batiking, and pushed the fabric through the holes with a skewer. This is a good way to get a consistent pattern on a piece of fabric.

Here's what it looked like from the back:

I tied off the tips, then dipped it into some dyes.

I forgot to take a picture of the finished piece, as I was trying to hurry and take pictures this morning at 7 am before leaving for work--it did turn out nicely.

I also tried the parfait dyeing again. I had two yellow-ish pieces that I had stamped some things onto (carved the stamps with speedball cutter) but wasn't thrilled with. So I parfaited them with fuchsia and some khaki.


And baby blankets are all done! Here is front and back sides of one.

And just the fronts of two others ready to go:

Baby quilts

The latest projects I've been working on, baby quilts.

Spring is here

Some flowers are blooming in my backyard -- but I haven't been able to mow my 2 foot tall lawn yet. Got my mower back from it's annual service the other day, but yesterday it rained almost all day. In my neighborhood, people don't mow on Sundays, it's a southern thing I guess, but I might have to break out my Yankee hat today and mow if the sun comes out.

Did some parfait dyeing last week on some stitched and wrapped shibori pieces. Here they are out of the jar I used to dye them in.





And a baby quilt I've been working on, still have a little quilting, then hope to do the binding and finish it today.